Do you have a hammer?

"There's an old business adage that says that if the only tool you have is a hammer, all problems look like nails."

For whatever reason, that hit a chord with me. I think it says a lot about potential clients in our industry & why a lot of them don't 'get' the difference between a virtual professional, a VA, and a staffing agency. In their minds, they are still thinking in employee/employer terms - they think their problem will be solved by 'hiring' someone to help them like they would hire an employee. With that kind of thinking (the 'hammer') then every solution looks similar (just different types of nails.)

The same is true for a lot of newer, less experienced VA's. They fill their 'toolbox' with inaccurate or less-than-realistic strategies and marketing tactics, then try to make everything fit to those tools. They get frustrated when the tools they're using don't work. Well, what if your market is full of 'screws' and you're only thinking of 'nails?' Since you're using a 'hammer' instead of a 'screwdriver,' you aren't giving your market what they need to solve their problem.

Am I making sense?

Anyway, just some lunchtime musings I thought I'd share. It was just a simple sentence I read that really seemed to sum up what's been going through my mind lately in a simple, easy to understand metaphor. - Thank you to Sandra Johnson

10 Laws for Better Email

Matthew Stibbe of Bad Language has this to say about emails:

Most emails are badly written. No surprise, perhaps, since we write more emails than anything else. By 2010, the business world will have produced 27,000 billion gigabytes of email. So what goes wrong?

• Not written with the reader in mind
• Not written to be scanned or read quickly
• Too many topics in one email
• Important information or requests buried in verbiage
• Reply in haste, repent at leisure
• Poor grammar, spelling and punctuation
• Using email when some other communication would have been better more ...